This weekend the self-guided audio tour component of the Once Upon A Time, Happily Ever After public art project becomes available to visitors of Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Right now there are 7 stops that can be downloaded from the website with more to come in September. You’ll also find a downloadable map designed by jesse and myself to supplement the material covered in the audio tour.

Visit the Lake Merritt Rotary Nature Center today and tomorrow, 10am to 4pm to get the full tour experience. You will have the opportunity to meet with the lead artist Scott Oliver, who will be handing out listening devices and answering questions.

This is only the beginning, the tour will run from Aug 7 to November 14th, every Saturday and Sunday, 10am to 4pm, with new material being unveiled periodically.

See the website for more information.

website:

http://www.onceuponatime-happilyeverafter.com/

link to MP3s of audio tour stops and tour map PDF:

http://www.onceuponatime-happilyeverafter.com/index.php?/audio-tour/

More updates as the project progresses!

Click the tileset image for a look at the Audio Tour map I’ve been working on.

V’s field illustrations (many of which were shown in the two previous posts) will fill in that array of nubby blank spaces you see encircling the map as well as a lot of the patterned space to the left and right (not apparent in the image). Plus, a key. And on the frontside there’ll be yet more tiling and a bunch of text. It’s getting offset print at legal size and will be given away for free as part of the Audio Tour experience (because it might come in handy).

More illustrations for the audio tour map.

Lake Merritt Flora and Fauna:

Illustrations of sites/stops along the “Once Upon A Time Happily Ever After” audio tour.  They will be included in the map Jesse and I are designing as a visual accompaniment and useful guide.

For the last five months I have been working as an artist mentor/ intern for the Youth Advisory Board at Southern Exposure.  Here is the final results of this collaboration with Artists: Monica Martinez and Meg Escude and the Youth Advisory Board Members: Essence Alexander, Pedro Aquino, Andrea Bautista, Angela Hernandez, Daniel Lemus, Paris Malone, Christian Mejia, Samuel Polanco, Nina Potepan, Benito Rodriguez, Katerin Romero, Lucy Thrupp, Julio Soria, Sophia Singleton, Tristan Vranizan, Natalie Rios, Genesis Ramirez, Stephanie Lopez and Dennis Vargas.

The exhibition titled Etch-A-Sketch will be on display at SOEX until June 26th.

“Southern Exposure’s Youth Advisory Board presents Etch-A-Sketch, the exciting culmination of 19 weeks of building, planning, researching, and going out into the city to conduct interviews with local business owners. YAB has created mobile display units that enable them to share ideas, objects and products they developed and conceived with the public. Inspired by markets of exchange, students investigated contemporary artists whose work in influenced by bartering, skill sharing, and trade-economies; and researched artwork influenced by the aesthetics of underground economies.”

I am currently working as a graphic designer/project assistant for Once Upon A Time, Happily Ever After….. :

“Initiated by Oakland-based artist Scott Oliver Once Upon A Time, Happily Ever After….. is a site-specific, collaborative project that takes Lake Merritt, located just east of Downtown Oakland, as both subject and setting. Often referred to as the “Jewel of Oakland” Lake Merritt comprises one of the city’s most significant centers of public life. Centrally located and relatively uncommercialized, the lake and it’s accompanying parks and attractions are a democratic space within the city where the diversity of Oakland’s citizenry is both visible and dynamic. More broadly a multitude of artificial and natural forces are at play in and around the lake at any given moment. Once Upon A Time, Happily Ever After… will explore how these forces converge, overlap, intermingle and coexist. “

I will share more details about the work in the next few months. For now please visit the website to learn about the project, which will include: an audio walking tour, a series of limited edition Lake Merritt souvenirs and watershed awareness signage.

A drawing that took 60 minutes to create.

A needlepoint that took 6 months.

Huge crowds amassed for the SOEX Monster Drawing Rally! I am glad so many people came out to support a good cause and hope all enjoyed the chance to witness creation in action or action creations.

I will be participating in the Southern Exposure 10th annual Monster Drawing Rally on March 5th. Come early if you want to see me create a 1 hour master piece. The festivities begin at 6pm and will be raging till 10. Tickets are $10 and all the drawings will be sold for $60 each. The money raised helps support an amazing and vital institution in the bay area arts community. To see a list of all the talented artist that will be making appearances check out the SOEX website.

For some time now I have been experimenting with a combination of cross stitch, embroidery, and dyed linen. The following is the first of a series I have completed, loosely using the structural organization of cartography to deal with ideas about form and color. The process reminds me of drawing where the thread acts as the mark and the stitch a buildup of texture. I have completed four and will have another two done in a week. Weather permitting I should post pictures up of the rest soon (good lighting is hard to come by these days)

This year’s APE was a huge success. We sold out of both the new Scaffold comic and the Map Prints. Thank you to everyone who visited our table. It was extremely encouraging to hear all the positive feedback and talk with others whose work we respect. I look forward to participating in more expos next year like Stumptown in Portland and the local zine fest in golden gate park.

As for now we are moving out of our studio/living space and will be floating around the Bay Area and Southern California for a time. Conceivably by the new year we should be settled into a new home and back to work in Oakland. The first project I have planned is a second printing of The Map Print Series to be sold in our online shop and perhaps peddled around to local stores. In the coming week Jesse and I will be putting the final touches on a revised Scaffold Comic that will hopefully get some sort of distribution. I will give more details as they become available. Thanks again to all those who came out and supported us!

Here is the first frame of our Scaffold comic. This is one of two to be composed at such a small scale (the original is 12X12 in; the eventual book version will be 8X8 in). The other 10 frames in the book will be 200% closer in. This one will also be colorized for the print version.

Needless to say, a lot left to do. It’s heartening to see it finally coming together though. It’s taken months to figure everything out (actually a year if you count last year’s version of this same comic).

These are practice sketches for the new Scaffold comic.

(Click on the images to enlarger)

After the Lode show I needed a break from installations and large scale (in the physical sense) projects. For the last two months I have been working on two new art pieces and sketching ideas for a comic Jesse and I plan to present at the Alternative Press Expo in October.

Nothing is finished yet, but I wanted to share the works in progress.

Above is the first in a series of needle point drawings I would like to make dealing with the theme of altered cycles. After I complete the embroidery pattern the linen will be stained like the sample swatch on the right.

This is a detail from a work on paper I am in the middle of called Underground Chasm. When it is finished I plan to do a run of screen prints using the same composition.

Click on the pictures to see larger images.